Too good not to pass along

Each Friday morning our pastor emails a message that – if he were a blogger – would surely garner comments. This one was too good not to share!

Today's message:

I have a “burr in my saddle” this morning.

It’s been a long time since I used that phrase. Like I even have a saddle or a horse to put it on. It has been some 46 years since I’ve ridden a horse … and if I remember correctly … the two of us didn’t get along very well. But as the phrase implies … something is bothering me this morning.

Now a lot of things “get on my nerves” … like when cling wrap isn’t clingy …

            … when remotes have too many buttons …

            … when spellcheck is WRONG …

            … when a book has no chapters …

            … when my blue socks don’t match …

            … or when something is advertised as “new and improved.” So which is it?

Yeah … I know … these are little things … but they “get under my skin” every once in a while.

But the thing that really bothers me this morning is the plethora of pharmaceutical commercials we have to put up with on television. When did our televisions get overtaken by medicine commercials? I don’t spend a lot of time watching TV but in the brief times I do … I have noticed the uptick in commercials for medicine. Even more annoying, these commercials spend two-thirds of their time describing side effects and some of them are downright embarrassing when watching with your kids or grandkids.

It seems we have pills for everything these days. Of course, we’ve always had medicinal helps or headaches, flu symptoms and tummy problem. But today … we have cute little Zoloft ads and coy ED spots that we don’t want our teenaged children to hear … much less our grade school youngsters. We have pills for arthritis, constipation, diarrhea, senility, blood pressure, cholesterol, depression, emotional stress, acne, weight loss, body odor, joint pain, asthma,

water retention, and on and on.

And the claims these ads make are … well exaggerated! “Instantly take off 10-15 pounds!” “Stay sharp and mentally focused – even to age 90!” “Be sexy into your 70s!” “Look younger longer!” “Eradicate crow’s feet and facial wrinkles!” “Have smaller thighs in just weeks!” “Boosts immunity for colds and flu!”

It’s like the “snake oil” salesmen of a century ago have returned in the form of TV advertisements … enticing, wooing, luring, seducing, tempting the viewer to try this or that product as a remedy for just about anything … and everything.

Frankly, I think there should be some kind of medicines out there to help with other problems we have. How about a pill for automatic memory recall? Maybe a pill for improving your vision? Or for improving one’s IQ? How about a pill for being more civil … more kind … or more loving? WOW! That would be a major breakthrough!

But the pill I’d most like to see marketed is a prescription medicine for Common Sense! There seems to be a real deficiency of this formerly standard characteristic. And should this ever be discovered … the law of the land should be that every politician be mandated to take two pills every day and call us in the morning. Maybe … just maybe that would make a difference in what comes out of our centers of government … at all levels.

Dear friend, guard Clear Thinking and Common Sense with your life; don't for a minute lose sight of them. They'll keep your soul alive and well … Wise living gets rewarded with honor; stupid living gets the booby prize. [Proverbs 2:21, 35 – The Message]

Have a blessed weekend in the Lord … I know I will, now that the burr is out of my saddle …

Pastor Rick

Note: In my research, I found that only two countries in the world … the United States and New Zealand … allow pharmaceutical companies to market their products directly to consumers in commercials. And … not surprising to me … a new study finds that when over-the-counter and prescription drug companies make commercials trying to sell the public on their product, they’re not always the most truthful.

Of Wine Tasting and Ribbon Cuttings

     Ah, small town life! I would never have said that the country's largest city in terms of land mass and 11th largest in population would fit that sentiment, but Jacksonville is, indeed, a small "everyone-knows-everyone-else" kinda town.
     Many of the stories for our monthly community paper are fun to cover and, selfishly, I keep most of the good ones for myself. This past month I partook in a wine tasting for the opening of a new wine boutique, shot a doughnut-eating contest, watched the demolition of a 50-year-old garage, covered the ribbon cuttings for a new credit union and an assisted living facility, took a "dusty shoes" tour of a memory care facility not quite ready to open, covered a back-to-school backpack giveaway for underprivileged children, and witnessed the honor of Jacksonville being named the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts 14th city in a partnership program called Any Given Child. I also attended a Dreams Come True event for a young girl whose wish was for a miniature Australian Shepherd.
     I took a photo of one woman who was closing her florist shop after 30 years in one location, another couple celebrating 25 years of their floral shop, and interviewed a 90-year-old blind quilter. I ran around taking photos of historical markers and huge murals, and I talked to arborists, bakers, construction workers, girls who went on mission trips, women who run food pantries, men who have started late-in-life careers as an owner of a health store for Baby Boomers or as a community courier service for people who can't get out to the grocery store.
     Every day is bright with opportunity to meet more people and connect the dots. "Oh, are you related to...?" "Do you know...?" are questions I ask regularly.
     Next month I will attend a quilt show and I hope to shoot photos from a small boat of 10 people who will swim the St. Johns River and in November I'll most likely be manning a booth for our newspaper at the First Annual Jacksonville Honeybee Festival. Life is good!

Roots and Shoots

     Bill and I are halfway through our second summer in Jacksonville and, at this point, I think I can say that we've started to take serious root.
     I love the way God worked in our lives -- and is working still -- to move us into jobs that are pleasurable and allow us to entrench ourselves into our new community.
     I'm still pinching myself -- even after two years of full-time living on our boat and after 21 months in Jacksonville -- and wondering when I'm going to wake up from the dream.
     Today we did things we probably would not have dreamed of doing in Pittsburgh. Nothing stupendous. Just different.
     Our marina -- which is resort-like, rather than the typical boatyard-type marina -- is a fun place for other boaters to come for part of a day. We've hosted two poker runs for boating clubs this summer, providing a two to three hour stopover for fun in the pool before the boaters head off to their next "poker hand".
     Since I've taken on part-time marketing for the marina, my job is to photograph all the parties and post them on the marina's Facebook page. Today I shot 173 photos and culled them down to 42 for Facebook. And, yes, I shot a lot of buxom, bikini-clad women, inevitably pared with older, paunchier cigarette boat-owning guys.
    Bill, the dockmaster and our new dockhand ran themselves ragged helping the 33 boats into empty slips among our four docks, while I captured it all on "film". It was sweltering hot and we hustled for two and a half hours. But, wow, would we be doing that in Pittsburgh?

     That's become our refrain here. "Would we be doing this in Pittsburgh?" we ask ourselves as we sit up on the flybridge, reading and sipping a glass of wine (me) and smoking a cigar (Bill) before dinner.
     "Would I be doing this in Pittsburgh?" I ask myself as I navigate my way around town and end up in a private small group meeting with the Sheriff of Jacksonville or the Mayor or one of our City Council members.
     "Would I be doing this in Pittsburgh?" Bill asks himself as he puts to use the trade skills he learned more than 50 years ago to engineer improvements at the marina.
     We loved our time in Pittsburgh -- don't get me wrong. It was the right place for us at the right time for 30 years. I still miss my friends and am so grateful for Internet technology that allows us to keep in touch and stay in tune.
     But I feel the roots starting to put out those small offshoots that help secure us to new soil -- right here in Jacksonville.

Funny what triggers a memory...

I think this is a Canary Island Date Palm, but I’m not sure. 

I thought it was a type of palmetto, which got me thinking about palmetto bugs, aka flying cockroaches, which reminded me of growing up in Miami and why to this day I put glasses and mugs upside down in the cabinets.

Then, upon pondering my childhood in southern Florida, I remembered the time in 1964, when my mother was in the hospital delivering my youngest sister Lois, that my sisters Patti and Beth (and maybe I was involved, I don’t recall…) pitched tons of apricots from one neighbor’s yard over a very tall hedge into another neighbor’s yard. Our grandmother made us go over and pick up all those apricots.

The neighbors who we assaulted happened to be an older middle-aged couple, probably in their 60s, named Bonafiglio. I think her name was Isabella and his was Frank or Vincent, but the family anecdote is that he was retired Mafia (or maybe he wasn’t so retired…who knows?).

Isabella had waist-long graying hair that she normally kept pinned up in a chignon and when she washed it once a week she would sit in the back yard in a kitchen chair to let it dry in the sun. She also had a capuchin monkey; we were invited inside the house once. Mr. B wore a wife-beater undershirt with slacks and a belt and dress shoes. At least, that’s what my memory says.

Awesome, Not Aww-some

On my daily walks around a very well-to-do neighborhood, I try to find something new every day. This neighborhood is ranked among the top 50 wealthiest communities in the United States. Last fall I amused myself by keeping track of the number of Romney signs versus Obama signs. I happened to mention that to someone recently and she said that some of the more strident Romney supporters would repeatedly remove the Obama yard signs. One woman got a bit more clever:

I alternate between two routes in the middle of the walk, which begins with one bridge and ends with another. One route takes me past that house, which I call the Talking House because the owner puts a new message up every week or so. Some of the banners are fun and whimsical; others are honest and full of hope:

Earlier this week on a walk, I was thinking about the whimsical and winsome nature of some homes in this neighborhood, crammed right next to more stately, grander homes. The former have something about them that causes the passer-by to say “Aww!” And then you come upon a monument of a home that invokes awe.

So much of what we gravitate towards has the Aww! factor. I’m sure you’ve seen lots of puppy and kitten memes posted on Facebook and watched more than a few cute YouTube baby videos. But a steady diet of things that make us go Aww! can cause us to miss – or dismiss – the things that awe:

While pondering the human penchant for cute and cuddly, it brought to mind a trend in faith and religion – that of trying to take the “awe” out of God in order to make Him appear more approachable, more buddy-like. While there’s a time and a place for knowing Jesus as a friend, I worry that our culture will more and more favor the image of the Baby Jesus and forget about the Savior Jesus, bowed and bloody on the cross.

I don’t know about you, but I want my God and my Savior to put awe in my heart and soul. Someone who has laid down his life for me is more deserving of my unending awe than a momentary Aww!

It's just stuff.

            “What were we thinking?” Bill said as we surveyed the contents of the U-Haul truck. “What are we going to do with all this stuff?”

  

            Well, back in June 2011 when we packed up the townhouse in Bradfordwoods, PA, I know what I was thinking… “We’ll need this stuff for our land-based home in Jacksonville. After all, we won’t be living on the boat forever.” Silly me, what was I thinking?

            It’s now clear that we may delay the purchase of a condo long enough that our memory and eyesight will be dim, and it will once again seem like new stuff.

            I honestly thought that we had pared down quite a bit back in Pittsburgh, selling rooms-full of furniture, exercise equipment, tools, books and household goods. Even in a 1,200-square-foot condo, surely we would be able to fit the contents of one bedroom, one study, a dining room, and living room, right?

            Lesson learned during the past two years: I can count on one hand – and still have fingers left over – the number of items that I could have used but managed to make do without. And now that my Mixmaster is finally in the same state, did I bring it back to the boat? Um…no. It’s still in storage because, after all, do I have time to bake? I’ll wait until Christmas to haul it out, dust it off and turn it on…maybe.

            Now, after two eight-hour driving days of a punishing ride (no cruise control, no air conditioning), and another eight hours of wrestling that stuff off the truck and into the double-wide storage unit, we have all our stuff in Jacksonville. (I did not participate in the driving trip, but I hauled my share of boxes from the truck to storage.)

            My husband, being the über-organizer that he is, arranged all the boxes with the labels facing out so that we can more easily get to some of this stuff when we need it. Never mind that we can’t read our own writing on some of the boxes. And there are a couple of mystery boxes with no labeling at all. Oops.

          The empty shelves are for the stuff we have in a small offsite storage unit nearby, which we'll vacate soon. 

          I have four file boxes of my father's sermons...50 years worth. By the time I'm retired with free time to scan and save them, the paper will probably have long crumbled to dust.

          Bill rigged a long pole down the center of the double-wide unit to hang cold weather clothes, for that once a year Christmas trip north.

Now I Know Why Cats Have 9 Lives

     I love cats. I always have, beginning with Blackie, the black and white tuxedo shorthair that we had in Miami in the early 1960s until he was hit by a car some years later when we lived in the country south of St. Louis.
     When I was in high school, we took in a too-young-to-be-weaned kitten that had to be hand fed. We didn't know that cats don't have a good swallowing reflex, so spooning milk down its throat was as good as trying to drown him. Maybe that's why he turned out to be so aggressive, attacking my youngest sister at night in her bed. Tiki made the move with the family to Chicago and regularly climbed a tree in the backyard to the roof of the parsonage and then down to the bedroom window on the second floor, asking to be let in. Unfortunately, it was Patti's bedroom and she was not a fan of that cat...
     After I finished college, I had three cats at one time. Sammy, a sweet female calico; Smokey, a beautiful gray male that I couldn't resist buying from a pet shop, and Yoda, a pure white male rescued from a family across the street. They allowed their toddler to try to drown that cat in the kiddy pool; I think it suffered some brain damage.
     Although I lost Sammy and Smokey in a custody battle, Yoda was soon joined by Cassie, a shy tortoise-shell longhair. They both moved with me to Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, but after Bill and I moved into our first house, we had to relinquish Yoda to Animal Friends. He had decided that the dining room was better than his litter box or the backyard.

     Cassie moved four more times with us and lived to nearly 20 years old. I was crushed when we had to put her down but her kidneys had started to fail. During the last five years with Cassie, we inherited Charles, another shorthair tuxedo who came with the townhouse we bought in Bradfordwoods, Pennsylvania.
     Charles was supposedly feral, but after surviving a severe infection brought on by eating an infected bird, he became quite domesticated, spending winter nights indoors with us. During his time with us, we acquired Cosmo (named after Kramer on Seinfeld) from a co-worker. Cosmo was a big boy; 22 pounds of long white fluff, but somewhat reclusive. The ring of the doorbell was enough to send him tearing up the stairs to hid under the bed. After Charles developed a huge tumor above his right eye, and kept scratching it open, the vet recommended he be put down. We think he was about 12. Within a few months, another stray showed up on our doorstep. Ocie (short for O.C. or Outside Cat) was coal black and made a nice contrast to Cosmo. Bill was not thrilled and wanted me to take Ocie to Animal Friends after socializing him, but that cat won me over and was soon spending nights in the house.
     Unfortunately, when we made the decision to move to Florida and live on our boat, we didn't think either Cosmo or Ocie would acclimate very well and had to find homes for them. A co-worker saw Cosmo's photo in my office one day and claimed him on the spot. Ocie was a harder case. I wanted (hoped) the new owners of our townhouse would take him in, but failing that, a neighbor with five cats of her own said that she would care for Ocie but he couldn't join hers indoors. When we left our townhome for the last time, I left   a letter for the new owners and a big container of cat food, hoping they would love him too. And they did.
     So, in June 2011, I became cat-free for the first time in my life. It was traumatic!
     By January 2012 it was clear to Bill that I needed another cat so we went to an animal adoption clinic at a local PetSmart and found Alfie. Although I had never really liked orange cats, Bill was drawn to this one despite its shyness.
     I've chronicled Alfie's bouts with chronic urinary tract infection and the frustration of trying to clear that up. Finally after eight months of rounds of antibiotics I decided to try cranberry powder and water therapy (a couple of syringes of water a day). That did the trick. Alfie started to settle down, gain weight...and bite.
     Yes, unfortunately, he has decided he's the dominant being in this household and has become quite aggressive. Last night he bit Bill hard enough to draw blood. I think Alfie is down to his fifth life. He better straighten out or he'll spend the last four in an animal shelter again. So far a water pistol seems to be the solution...